Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Well, look no further than the scandalous mess at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Crappy hospitals, endless waits, mountains of paperwork and, at the end of the day, no real accountability from the people who run the joint. Folks, if the government can't or won't take good care of our injured soldiers, what makes you think that it will take good care of little Sally or Uncle Bill?

There are very few things that government does well, and even fewer that government does better than the private sector.

We have been conditioned—by politicians who either hope to consolidate their own power or are so narcissistic that they think they (and only they) have the solutions to the world's problems—to think that government is a force for good, acting only to better society and to provide what the cold, cruel private sector does not.

There is such a thing as a market externality—these are the problems that the market will not act to solve, and result in situations where government truly is the only solution.

But the simple fact is that healthcare is as screwed up as it is today because of government intervention and regulation and the unfettered right to sue a doctor for pretty much anything.

Even for all of these problems, however, we have the best healthcare system in the world. We provide the kind of medical expertise that is not available anywhere else in the world. Sure, there are some treatments you can't get in the United States that you can get elsewhere—but we can easily boast the best doctors in the world. Furthermore, we do not have long waits for surgery—think it happens like that in countries with universal coverage? Not bloody likely.

5 comments:

while we are much, much better off than patients in nations held up as examples of socialized medicine in many ways like medical innovation (compared to Scandinavians) and standards of care (UK) and availability of our home-grown quality doctors (Cuba), lets not ever forget that we also spend more (and I believe more per person) than all these countries and continue to have tens of millions of working citizens without any coverage. shorter lines for surgery than the british means nothing to those who can get nothing besides emergency room care.

that being said, poorly directed inefficient govt regulation is one of the, not the only, reason for the major problems with American health care. government does have a role in solving the health care crisis, but obviously cannot handle it in a fashion that many on the left want.